Crossfire

Gosh, another critical favorite I thought was just barely OK.
But this 1947 movie
has Robert Young, way before he was the Father who Knew Best.
Also Robert Mitchum. And Robert Ryan. And someone not named Robert,
the endlessly watchable Gloria Grahame. Directed by Edward
Dmytryk. So the pieces were in place, enough of them for it to be nominated
for five Oscars. But…

Young plays a jaded police detective investigating a brutal homicide of a
Jewish civilian;
Suspicion falls on a group of soldiers,
eventually settling on a hapless youngster who can't account for
his activities. But Mitchum is skeptical, and eventually so
is Young. Helping them along is the occasional anti-semitic outburst
from Ryan. This causes Young to become less jaded, and he switches from
smoking a ubiquitous pipe to ubiquitous cigarettes.

It eventually drops into a preachy and unsubtle
melodrama about anti-semitism. (Not that anti-semitism's a bad thing
to be preachy about, probably even more so in 1947.) Interestingly,
according to Wikipedia:

In the novel [on which the movie was based], the victim was homosexual. As told in the film The
Celluloid Closet and in the documentary included on the DVD edition of
the Crossfire film, the Hollywood Hays Code prohibited any mention of
homosexuality because it was seen as a sexual perversion. Hence, the
book's theme of homophobia was changed to one about racism and
antisemitism.

It would be a few more years before Hollywood considered it to be
safe to produce a movie
taking a brave stand against murdering homosexuals.

Split Image

The ninth, and probably the last, novel written by the late, great,
Robert B. Parker
in his Jesse Stone series. (But not the last in the series, apparently.
See below.)

A thug's body is found in the trunk of his Cadillac Escalade on the
scenic causeway in Paradise, Massachusetts (a thinly disgusied
Marblehead).
Jesse's task here is to discover the perpetrator; he's immediately
drawn to the thug's employer, organized crime boss Reggie Galen,
who lives in a nice house out on the neck. Coincidentally, Galen
lives right next door to another crime boss, Knocko Moynihan.
Even more coincidentally (and what might be deemed far-fetched),
Knocko and Reggie are married to identical beautiful
twin sisters. If you already smell something sordid going on, you're
right.

In a parallel case, Boston female PI Sunny Randall has been
hired by concerned parents
to locate their wayward daughter; she's taken up with a bunch of
cultists in Paradise. This naturally involves Jesse as well, and
gives them a chance to rekindle their romantic relations from previous
books. Cool!

So is this the end for Jesse? Apparently not: Amazon has a page up for
Robert
B. Parker's Killing the Blues,
authored by Michael Brandman, to be released
in September of this year. A little poking
around reveals that Brandman is a TV writer/producer, most recently
for the Jesse Stone series of made-for-TV movies starring Tom Selleck
as Jesse.

I'm not sure how I feel about that! Generally, I frown on cynical
attempts to squeeze more money from book-buying rubes based on their
auto-purchasing affection
for a suddenly (um) nonprolific author.

On the other hand, I'd kind of like to know what happens next to Jesse,
Sunny, and the various supporting characters.

On the third hand, is it really "what happens next", if it's not Parker
telling the story? Hm…

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